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The Mitt Romney Pardon

It’s been superexciting watching one outsized, vibrant and deeply strange Republican candidate after another rise to the front of the presidential pack, then crash and burn. But now we’ve got to refresh the storyline.

Really, even the TV networks are starting new mini-seasons. And they’ve got zombies.

This is particularly important for Mitt Romney, who seems to be responding to the flip-flop critique by becoming more and more repressed. If we don’t do something to free him up, they’re going to have to start wheeling him around in a laundry hamper.

“How can voters trust what they hear from you today is what you will believe if you win the White House?” asked Bret Baier of Fox News in a recent interview, mentioning changes of position on global warming, abortion, immigration and gay rights. He and Mitt appeared to be sitting in a warehouse full of canned goods, and Romney looked approximately as comfortable as the three wealth managers who had to appear on camera claiming the $254 million they won with a $1 Powerball ticket.

“Your list is just not accurate so, one, we’re going to have to be better informed,” Romney began.

His other responses included: “This is an unusual interview. Heh. Heh. Heh. Heh.”

And, indeed, it was. Romney hasn’t done a Sunday talk show since “The Hurt Locker” beat “Avatar” for best picture. He is generally kept so far away from one-on-one interviews that he might as well be wrapped in cellophane. While stuffed in a laundry hamper. Which would eventually be installed in a campaign bus that could just drive around states that are in play, while never actually leaving the highway.

Never have we had a more uptight potential president. This is all because he’s a big, huge, bundle — well, actually, a lean, well-exercised, impeccably groomed bundle — of contradictory positions whose history he cannot possibly justify without standing up and screaming: Look, I’m running for office! I have to make things up!

Photo

Gail CollinsCredit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

It’s time to free Mitt from his demons. I propose that we give him one week in which to decide at which point in his life he was actually expressing his true opinion on any given topic, and we will just clear the slate and go from there.

For instance, it seems likely that despite Romney’s story about not understanding what an embryo was until after he was elected governor of Massachusetts, he has always been privately anti-choice. So let’s go with that and erase those rather emotional moments in his debates with Ted Kennedy when he recalled his mother’s pro-choice Senate candidacy and the close family relative who had died from an illegal abortion. (“It is since that time my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter, and you will not see me wavering on that.”)

Poof. It’s gone.

I think we should also accept Romney’s word that his current position on Detroit (let the carmakers go bankrupt) is the real Mitt. Honestly, the man spent his whole career laying people off.

But, in return, he ought to admit that he really does believe in global warming and that he’s always thought everybody should be required to have health insurance. Really, you can look that one up in his book.

Also, he has to stop bragging that the proof of his consistency is his refusal to totally disavow the Massachusetts health care law. “This whole stream of thought that you began with, which is: ‘Oh well, you’d say anything to get elected’ — if that were the case, would I still be defending Massachusetts health care?” Romney demanded in his warehouse interview.

Now how does a guy who was governor, who signed the health care law and waved it around like a pennant, go about renouncing the whole thing? I’ll bet he would have if he could have, but how would that work? Could Romney just explain that he was held captive by Democratic terrorists all the time it took the bill to pass, while a stuffed version of Mitt was substituted for public events? It’d be sort of embarrassing to admit that nobody noticed the difference.

On immigration, we could all agree to let Romney rant about amnesty now if he will concede that he didn’t give a fig about the whole question back when his lawn was being clipped by undocumented workers in 2006.